At 11:18 AM 11/5/96 -0400, David G. Durand wrote:
>At 1:24 AM 11/5/96, Charles F. Goldfarb wrote:
>> A fundamental principle of SGML (perhaps *the* fundamental principle) is that
>>parsing the *SGML text* of a document produces the same data, every single
>>time.
>>Without that principle, SGML documents aren't portable and reusable. (Data
>>entities aren't affected by this rule, since they aren't parsed in context.)
>
>This makes some sense in a DP environment with fixed files for entities,
>but not on the web, as I have argued before.
I'm really confused by the assertion that parsing the SGML text produces
"the same data." The same data as what? If you exclude cases where
the entity is manually or automatically created/revised (you have to
have created the entity somehow, and once created, it might need to be
changed), then this is a tautology: It's the same data as itself. What
am I missing?
Eve